Here's how it all started.

Jon Reineke and Ken Rolland originally met in Long Lake, Minnesota. Jon was a new employee at a company for which Ken was performing back-office systems design, programming and report processing as an independent contractor. They got to know each other pretty well, and eventually went their separate ways career-wise, but kept in touch. Ken and his wife Karen are now Realtors® in Punta Gorda, Florida and Jon, after obtaining his Associates degree in programming and a few Microsoft certs, is working for a consulting firm in downtown Minneapolis.

Ken and Karen had set up a couple of websites and were finding that making changes was neither an efficient nor a cost-effective process since template website companies aren't really set up to do NEW THINGS Jon helped them set up some additional remote pages and was working on some other development projects with them, AND THEN...

They got hacked!

At first we didn't worry about it too much. We called and talked to our web host and they assured us we wouldn't be down long. so we waited... and we waited. and we waited some more. No one fixed anything or even told us how the problem was being addressed, so we finally just pushed the site out ourselves and were surprised when it worked. We figured it could have been worse and that we had gotten "lucky".

Guess what? Things got worse.

Without going into too much detail, the web host company we were using came into some difficulty providing us with the level of service we expected - like having our customers being re-routed to a site that said our site had been turned off!

Strike one.

In conjunction with their real estate business, Ken and Karen joined the Women's Council of Realtors (WCR). Recently, Ken took over web site administration for the local chapter and asked Jon to help out. We never intended to do anything other than maintenance (which we felt we could do ourselves and save the chapter some $$$). We requested the information we needed to get started (the usernames and passwords) and after six weeks we had obtained read-only access, not at all what we requested. In the meantime we had staged our proposed changes in the background of one of their sites, but that was starting to push on that site's limits.

Strike two.

We started investigating what it would take to become a web host ourselves. Jon was certainly qualified as a MCSE, an Associates degree in Computer Programming, and eight years in IT consulting. Ken had been in IT since 1979 with a background in databases along with a mastery of processes and process control. So we did! Really, how hard could it be?

Be advised . we had to learn some basic stuff through trial and error, but together we've have had far fewer problems on our own than we had in the above two instances.

If you're tired of dealing with your web guy or gal because they make you feel like a moron and keep telling you that you just wouldn't understand. let us know.

We'll explain to you what they won't and we'll hopefully make it fun again.